CBC:

Andrea, why on Earth would you want to put out a journal full of dull research?

Well, I think science has a problem and it’s a problem with publication bias.

We believe that a lot of the other journals are biased in the other direction — towards publishing attractive, catchy, strong, statistically significant results.

We kind of want to fill the void and publish results that are the opposite of that —unsurprising, weaker, statistically insignificant, not conclusive and so on.

Ed Treleven:

former East High School business and marketing teacher was charged Wednesday with seven more counts of attempting to create child pornography by using hidden cameras and one new charge of transporting seven minors to Minnesota with the intention of creating child pornography with hidden cameras.

The additional charges against David M. Kruchten, 38, of Cottage Grove, issued by a federal grand jury in a superseding indictment, involve alleged acts on different dates than those in the original indictment, issued on Jan. 29. The original indictment alleged that Kruchten attempted to create child pornography on Oct. 27, 2019, and on Jan. 20, 2019, all in Wisconsin.

The new indictment contains those alleged acts as well as seven more on Oct. 29, 2019, again all in Wisconsin. The charge of transporting minors is for allegedly taking minors to Minnesota on Dec. 6, 2019, with the intent to create child pornography.

Emily Gould:

One exciting thing about being alive at this pivotal moment in history is that I’m constantly learning about strong opinions I didn’t previously know I had. Before mid-March 2020, if you’d asked me how I felt about videoconferencing, I’d have shrugged. It’s fine? Now I would have to amend that opinion slightly. It’s not fine. It’s horrible, a form of psychic torture, and I hate it so deeply that my hatred feels physical, like an allergic reaction.

This allergy isn’t caused by my adult professional experiences: I can force myself to participate in online panels and meetings and literary events (though I will not, I’m sorry, attend my extended family’s weekly Zoom happy hour). I can plan ahead and deal with the sucked-dry, brain-dead exhaustion that follows a Zoom-heavy day. My hatred comes, rather, from having coached my 5-year-old son Raffi through virtual schooling in the spring. And I’m dreading the fall, when his kindergarten class will be conducted at least partially, and possibly entirely, remotely. I’m eager to be proved wrong, but I suspect that for him and for my family, Zoom kindergarten might be worse than no school at all.

Rod Dreher:

A reader who works for a federal agency (he asked me not to disclose which one) writes about his recent experience in a leadership training program.

Twenty percent of the training, 1 day’s worth, is devoted to woke diversity.  I have attached the sanitized version of the power point that was presented to us.  Going back, I realized this document did not have all the woke aspects that were presented to us.

I have spent decades in liberal bastions of academia (student, grad student and professor on the tenure track) and federal government (USDA).  Diversity has been preached as a good unto itself.  But diversity trainings have changed over time.  They have become much more woke.

1. Equity instead of equality.  Equality is no longer the goal.  Rather equity and ensuring equal outcomes.  The examples were that pay, bonuses, raises, etc were provided the same across racial groups. The trainer did not mention equality or equal opportunity at all.   It was all about equity and equal outcomes.

2. Allyship.  It is no longer acceptable for people to exhibit tolerance.  We must be allies who accept and embrace however people identify themselves.  One of the largest topics was allyship particularly for LGBTQ.  I must accept and embrace sinful behavior or else.  I can’t just tolerate and work with people fairly, I must embrace all aspects of them and their behavior.

3.  The training had the beginnings of a struggle session.  The facilitator stressed repeatedly and at length that we need to make ourselves uncomfortable by self introspection and that we should change our beliefs.

4. The facilitator repeatedly associated the term “Fair and balanced” with bigoted and biased people whose actions are clearly discriminatory.

Bianca Vazquez Torres:

The president of the state’s largest public teachers union tallied up its recent wins in an online meeting with thousands of members earlier this month: Schools around the state will start later. State funding won’t be cut. Worcester, Swampscott, Lawrence, and many other districts will open remotely.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped and redefined the discussion around how best to educate the state’s children, the state’s three influential teachers unions have played a key role in elevating health concerns related to reopening, including pointing out that many schools have inadequate ventilation systems and advocating for the state to provide masks and testing.

David V. Rosowsky and Bridget M. Keegan:

If you stay in the trench, you can’t see what’s in front of you, let alone what’s on the horizon. Reflecting upon years of discussion about American higher education, we’ve noticed that the very structures and principles that have made our model great are potentially holding us back. It’s time to ask ourselves: Are those principles and structures ones that we would design were we to start from scratch?

Specifically, does our current system of organizing our institutions as academic schools, colleges and departments still make sense? Have our organizational structures evolved as we have added — but rarely subtracted — new departments, programs and centers? Is a proliferation of departments good for students, faculty members, employers or the university?

In the midst of the tremendous uncertainty we are experiencing with COVID-19, and the numerous changes forced upon our most basic activities, administrative restructuring may not be a high priority for many people in academe. But faculty have demonstrated tremendous creativity in responding to the pandemic, and our hope is that this might inspire greater openness and curiosity, as well as a sense of agency regarding embracing what would be a very constructive change.

If recent developments are any indication, at most universities, we start with a collection of disparate scholars and fields, impose a departmental structure and then go to great lengths to create centers and institutes and cross-cutting programs that work around that department structure. But can universities function with so many different subcultures? Are we broadening opportunities for students or confusing them? Are we creating too many choices? Are we inviting too many surfaces for tension between academic units, faculty or disciplines? Are departments organized to engage in meaningful discussions around interdisciplinary education and scholarship? How about for faculty hiring or decisions about promotion and tenure?

Ruth Ingram:

Qelbinur Sedik has witnessed wanton cruelty, gratuitous violence, humiliation, torture, and death meted out to her people on an unimaginable scale — but has been forced to keep the crushing secret until now.

When she first arrived in Europe, she was so traumatized she could barely speak about her ordeal. Then she found the Dutch Uyghur Human Rights Organization (DUHRO), where people patiently listened through her many tears. The DUHRO wrote down her story, calling it “Qelbinur Sidik: A Twisted Life.” Through it, she now feels ready to tell the world what she saw in the internment camps of Xinjiang.

This account is based on excerpts from the memoir and my own interviews with her.

Her personal story begins 51 years ago in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region (XUAR) in northwestern China. A middle child in a family of six children, she remembers her childhood warmly. Her parents emphasized honesty and education, and each child grew up to become a valued member of society, some even taking government jobs.

She started her teaching career in the Chinese language department of Number 24 Primary School in the Saybagh region of downtown Urumqi. By April 2018, she had worked there for 28 years. But as a rookie teacher in 1990, with life before her, she could never have envisaged the tidal wave of destruction that would engulf her people and its culture.

Alec Johnson:

“Of course I agree with the statement (Black lives matter),” but the Black Lives Matter organization is “not something that I as a conservative can or will ever support,” Damico wrote, adding he compared the group to the KKK. 

The comparison is one others such as a New York assemblyman and a sandwich shop owner in California have also come under fire for making.

The Ku Klux Klan, founded at the end of the Civil War, is an American hate group with Black Americans the Klan’s primary target, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC, a U.S. nonprofit organization that monitors the activities of domestic hate groups, said the KKK was formed to intimidate Southern Blacks to prevent them from enjoying basic civil rights. 

Black Lives Matter is a global organization whose goal is to eradicate white supremacy, its website says. BLM was founded in 2013 in response to the acquittal of the man who killed Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager, in Florida. The organization is in the spotlight in the aftermath of the George Floyd death in Minneapolis, a Black man who died after a white police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes while in police custody. Protesters have called for an end to racial injustice and have chanted “Black lives matter.”

Damico, who was the assistant coach for three seasons, said Germantown High School Athletic Director Sara Unertl told him the district was concerned about his Facebook posts, some of which also referenced “rioting and looting,” and “most having firearm references.” 

Logan Wroge:

Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes

Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.

Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.

(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.

– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Douglas Harris:

New Orleans is the new Finland in Douglas N. Harris’s new book, Charter School City. An obsession with Finland swept through the education policy world in the first years of this century, when that country’s students posted particularly strong results on some international tests. Researchers, advocates, and policymakers flocked to Finland to identify the secret of their success. Most of them returned home trumpeting whatever policy they had already been championing as the “key” to superior performance in Finland. If they opposed testing, they noted Finland’s low reliance on standardized testing. If they favored higher teacher pay and stricter credentialing, they touted Finland’s teacher preparation and compensation policies. If they favored progressive education pedagogy, they focused on the priority Finland gives to the arts and child-centered learning.

In truth, these analysts had no way of isolating which features of the Finnish education system or society might be responsible for that country’s high test scores. All of these policies were in place at the same time, and any of them could have helped, hurt, or had no effect on Finnish results. For all we know, strong test performance there was caused by the type of fish the Finns eat—or it was merely a fluke. Undeterred, those determined to learn from Finland chose to focus on a particular feature and tell a plausible story about how that feature produced Finnish success, as if that were persuasive evidence of a causal effect.

Meghan Mangrum:

Tennessee will not publicly report the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases linked to schools despite Gov. Bill Lee’s previous commitment to create such a plan, state officials said Tuesday.

On Aug. 4, Lee said his administration was in the process of creating a plan that would allow schools to share information about the number of COVID-19 cases in their facilities.

The governor’s commitment came just days after officials with the state Department of Health said the agency would not ask for and collect data on the number of cases and deaths at each school.

“The real challenge is to provide as much information as possible to provide for transparency and to give information that is important to the public but continue to provide and adhere to privacy restrictions that FERPA and HIPAA require,” Lee said during a news briefing Tuesday, citing federal health and education privacy laws. “And that’s a balance.”

OCPA:

By a two-to-one margin, Oklahomans say that if schools don’t open in the fall, parents should be able to take their tax dollars and go to another school.

This according to a statewide survey of active likely voters conducted August 10–13, 2020. The survey, with a sample size of 630 and a margin of error of +/- 3.9 percent, was commissioned by OCPA and conducted by Cor Strategies (script here, results here, methodology here). 

Let the Money Follow the Child

As uncertainty continues to swirl around COVID-19, voters were asked if parents should be given more options:

“If a local school district decides not to hold classes in person, do you agree or disagree that each parent in that district should have the right to take their children and tax dollars to the school of their choice, whether public or private?”

• Strongly agree … 45%

• Somewhat agree … 18%

• Total agree … 63%

• Somewhat disagree … 8%

• Strongly disagree … 23%

• Total disagree … 31%

• Unsure … 6%

Support is extremely high among Republicans (79% agree, 16% disagree) and very high among Independents (58% agree, 34% disagree). Among Democrats, 44% agree while 49% disagree.

Craig Torres:

The concentration of market power in a handful of companies lies behind several disturbing trends in the U.S. economy, like the deepening of inequality and financial instability, two Federal Reserve Board economists say in a new paper.

Isabel Cairo and Jae Sim identify a decline in competition, with large firms controlling more of their markets, as a common cause in a series of important shifts over the last four decades.

Those include a fall in labor share, or the chunk of output that goes to workers, even as corporate profits increased; and a surge in wealth and income inequality, as the net worth of the top 5% of households almost tripled between 1983 and 2016. This fueled financial risks and higher leverage, the economists say, as poorer households borrowed to make ends meet while richer ones shoveled their wealth into bonds — feeding the demand for debt instruments.

“The rise of market power of the firms may have been the driving force” in all of these trends, Cairo and Sim write in the paper. Published this month by the non-partisan Fed Board staff, which doesn’t reflect the views of governors, it’s the latest in a series examining the risks that weaker competition poses to a market economy.

That issue is increasingly prominent on the agenda of both America’s main political parties. Democrats said in a recent summary of policy priorities that they’re “concerned about the increase in mega-mergers and corporate concentration across a wide range of industries.” The Department of Justice under President Donald Trump is probing large technology platforms.

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 system has long resisted student and parent choice.

Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes

Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.

Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.

(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.

– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Lucy Cramer:

The effect of the new national-security law that China imposed on Hong Kong is extending far beyond the territory to American college campuses.

Classes at some elite universities will carry a warning label this fall: This course may cover material considered politically sensitive by China. And schools are weighing measures to try to shield students and faculty from prosecution by Chinese authorities.

At Princeton University, students in a Chinese politics class will use codes instead of names on their work to protect their identities. At Amherst College a professor is considering anonymous online chats so students can speak freely. And Harvard Business School may excuse students from discussing politically sensitive topics if they are worried about the risks.

Shawn Wheat:

A Goodyear employee said the company has put out a new policy that has some calling it not equal for all.

A photo seen circulating on social media shows a slide that was presented during a diversity training showing what’s acceptable and what isn’t acceptable as part of Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co.‘s zero-tolerance policy.

Under acceptable: Black Lives Matter (BLM), Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Pride.

Listed as unacceptable: Blue Lives Matter, All Lives Matter, MAGA Attire, Political Affiliated Slogans or Material.

Kara Zupkus:

An English professor at Iowa State University has threatened to dismiss students who voice opposition to abortion or the Marxist Black Lives Matter organization from her upcoming class this fall. She falsely claims students who resist leftist orthodoxy hold a viewpoint “that takes at its base that one side doesn’t deserve the same basic human rights as you do.”

According to the syllabus obtained exclusively by Young America’s Foundation, Chloe Clark includes a “GIANT WARNING,” for her English 250 class bolded near the top of the document:

“GIANT WARNING: any instances of othering that you participate in intentionally (racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, sorophobia, transphobia, classism, mocking of mental health issues, body shaming, etc) in class are grounds for dismissal from the classroom. The same goes for any papers/projects: you cannot choose any topic that takes at its base that one side doesn’t deserve the same basic human rights as you do (ie: no arguments against gay marriage, abortion, Black Lives Matter, etc). I take this seriously.”

Iowa State’s response.

Chris Stewart discusses our long term, disastrous reading results with Kaleem Caire.

mp3 audio

transcript

2011: A majority of the Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter school.

Kaleem Caire notes and links.

Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes

Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.

Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.

(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.

– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

So everyone is talking about UNC’s COVID-19 mess – and all that criticism is perfectly valid.

But we also need to talk about why the uni-administration probably had no choice.

Buckle up and let’s talk about university finances and the 4 horsemen of the academipocalypse. 1/lots?

— Bret Devereaux (@BretDevereaux) August 19, 2020

Jeffrey Tucker:

What becomes of government credibility in the post-lockdown period? There are thousands of politicians in this country for whom this is a chilling question, even a taboo topic. 

The reputation of government was already at postwar lows before the lockdowns, with only 17% of the American public saying that they trusted government to do the right thing. That was before the federal government and 43 state governors decided to turn a virus into a pretext for totalitarian closures, lockdowns, travel restrictions, and home quarantines of most people. 

The lockdowns and random policy impositions by government will surely contribute to take the confidence number down to rock bottom. Already, loss of confidence has devastated consumer sentiment. No matter how many headlines blame the virus for all the carnage, the reality is all around us: it’s the government’s response that bears the responsibility. 

In 2006, the great epidemiologist Donald Henderson warned that if government pursued coercive measures to control a virus, the result would be a “loss of confidence in government to manage the crisis.” The reason is that the measures do not work. Further, the attempt to make them work turns a manageable crisis into a catastrophe. 

Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes

Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.

Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.

(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.

– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Joseph Cox:

The Secret Service paid for a product that gives the agency access to location data generated by ordinary apps installed on peoples’ smartphones, an internal Secret Service document confirms.

The sale highlights the issue of law enforcement agencies buying information, and in particular location data, that they would ordinarily need a warrant or court order to obtain. This contract relates to the sale of Locate X, a product from a company called Babel Street.

Annysa Johnson:

The hallways of Milwaukee School of Languages were empty Monday morning.

There were no students excitedly catching up on their busy summer break. No lockers slamming or announcements over the loudspeaker. No one running to get to class on time.

Spanish teacher Marielle Rivera sat in a sunny corner of her classroom, flags of the United States and Latin American countries overhead and Black Lives Matter posters on the front of her desk. And she laid out her expectations for the school year for her eighth-grade students, whose faces she sees on the computer screens in front of her.

Joanne Jacobs:

Teachers’ unions aren’t just fighting to keep their own public schools closed, writes Fordham’s Checker Finn. They don’t want charters and private schools to open either.

He lives in Montgomery County, Maryland, which ordered private schools to stay closed, then backed down after Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, intervened.

I would wager my high school diploma that the Montgomery County teachers union, having achieved its wish to keep the public schools virtual this fall (after having thrown much sand into the district’s efforts at online learning during the spring), and in the heat of a vexed negotiation over its next contract, whispered into (County Executive Marc) Elrich’s receptive ears that it would be unfair to allow the private schools to open for business and thereby show them up. And I’d wager my college degree that the peeved private school parents who protested the county’s move to Hogan’s office fed gubernatorial suspicions that this school-closing order was again the handiwork of the union, its catspaw in the County Executive’s office, and its fellow travelers at the state level.

Across the country, teachers’ unions are using strike threats to block reopening plans. While teachers say they’re concerned with safety, demands include “paying teachers and other school personnel extra to work during the pandemic, and keeping charter and private schools closed, too, lest the competition look more appealing to parents, politicians, and possibly teachers themselves,” writes Finn.

Heather Mac Donald:

Fealty to “diversity” and denunciations of white privilege have been a unifying theme in academia for decades, of course. What’s different this time is the sheer venom of the denunciations. College presidents and deans competed for the most sweeping indictment of the American polity, rooted in the claim that blacks are everywhere and at all times under threat.

“We are again reminded that this country’s 400-year history of racism continues to produce clear and present danger to the bodies and lives of Black people in every part of the United States,” wrote Ted Ruger, dean of the University of Pennsylvania law school. Amherst College president Carolyn “Biddy” Martin announced that the “virulent anti-black racism in this country has never NOT been obvious, and yet there are those who continue to deny it.” Martin was making a plea, she said, “to white people in particular, to acknowledge the reality of anti-black racism, its long history, and its current force; to recognize how embedded it is in our institutional structures, social systems, and cultural norms; and to assume our responsibility for ending it.” UCLA chancellor Gene Block declared that “racism permeates every sector of our society, from education to employment, from housing to health care, from board rooms to court rooms.” It was not just name-brand colleges that pumped out sweeping accusations. Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina, for example, demanded that “our society, systems, and institutions” stop “treat[ing] black and brown Americans violently and perpetuat[ing] deep inequality.”

Some presidents hastily crafted a redo of their initial George Floyd statements after their first effort was deemed insufficiently damning of America. Middlebury College president Laurie Patton apologized for not focusing enough on the “root cause and specific harm” of the black community’s “profound pain” in her initial letter to the college. “I needed to name the specific and systemic violence experienced by Black people,” Patton said. “I now understand that members of our community needed to hear that.” Patton’s second effort took no chances. The Floyd death was the “result of centuries of entrenched racism in a nation built on and maintained by unjust and inequitable systems of power, including the policies and practices of law enforcement,” she wrote.

Tom SF Haines:

Eighteen and dreaming of the future must be hard in 2020. Can you even count how many apocalypses, disasters and fascists there are? Eighteen and wondering which one is going to ruin you. For many they just found out: A-Level results. Obviously it has gone catastrophically wrong, but why? To summarise, mistakes have occurred throughout, but I am going to focus on two key technical mistakes. 1) The experimental design is faulty, leaving all conclusions unsupported and 2) the core algorithm is mathematically unsound, generating results that are problematic.

Let’s start with the model used by Ofqual to predict grades (p85 onwards of their 319 page report). Each school submits a list of their students from worst student to best student (it included teacher suggested grades, but they threw those away for larger cohorts). Ofqual then takes the distribution of grades from the previous year, applies a little magic to update them for 2020, and just assigns the students to the grades in rank order. If Ofqual predicts that 40% of the school is getting an A then that’s exactly what happens, irrespective of what the teachers thought they were going to get. If Ofqual predicts that 3 students are going to get a U then you better hope you’re not one of the three lowest rated students. And so on.

Susan Essoyan:

As of 8:30 a.m. Monday, out of the 12,820 public school teachers statewide, there were 496 requests for substitutes, according to the Department of Education. Substitutes cover for teachers who take personal leave or are out sick as well as vacant positions. On any given day, the number of subs needed ranges from 300 to 1,000, the department said.

At Waialua, all teachers came to work except for one who was out sick, Alexander said. While the day went well for the kids, she acknowledged it was a lot of work for the staff, given the new safety protocols.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “We are all exhausted.”

Hunter Harris, 17, has been on the front lines of the debate over school reopenings as the student representative on the statewide Board of Education. He is starting his senior year at Kapolei High from his home in Makakilo.

His school originally intended to have all students come to campus for a full day of orientation over this week, but ultimately made it optional and cut the time to two hours, he said.

“With the recent triple-­digit cases for the past week, almost two weeks, it was very smart on their part to lessen the time and the number of kids,” he said. “I think that right now we need to come together as a community to make sure we are all safe,” he said. Collaboration is so key right now.”

Scott Girard:

Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes

Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.

Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.

(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.

– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Randy Connolly:

As far as mea culpas go, Greenspan’s was considerably more concise, but also much more insightful as to the root problem. Greenspan admitted the problem was not due to misguided user expectations, or to poorly worded license agreements, or to rogue developers. Instead he recognized the problem lay in a worldview that seemed to work for a while … until it didn’t. In the immediate after-math of the financial crisis, there were calls for reforms, not only of the financial services industry, but also within universities, where it was thought that unrealistic models and assumptions within economics departments20 and business schools11 were also responsible for inculcating a worldview that led to the crisis. It is time for us in computing departments to do some comparable soul searching.

This article is one attempt at this task. It argues the well-publicized social ills of computing will not go away simply by integrating ethics instruction or codes of conduct into computing curricula. The remedy to these ills instead lies less in philosophy and more in fields such as sociology, psychology, anthropology, communications, and political science. That is, because computing as a discipline is becoming progressively more entangled within the human and social lifeworld, computing as an academic discipline must move away from engineering-inspired curricular models and integrate the analytic lenses supplied by social science theories and methodologies. To this end, the article concludes by presenting three realistic recommendations for transforming academic computing in light of this recognition.

Hacker News:

I’m a professional software engineer with two middle-school aged children and a working partner cramped into a small apartment. Since the shelter in place orders happened and my employer switched everyone to work from home, my apartment has seemed less and less suitable for productivity. It’s also not the best environment for children to remain cooped up in their rooms on electronics all day, every day. My partner and I have experimented with some online camps and our local public schools have gone purely virtual, but I’m considering alternative schools this year as well as moving out of our cramped apartment.

Parents: What have you tried? What did you love? What did you hate?

John Lott:

Thirty-seven states have so far changed their mail-in voting procedures this year in response to the Coronavirus. Despite frequent claims that President Trump’s warning about vote fraud/voting buying with mail-in ballots is “baselessly” or “without evidence” about mail-in vote fraud, there are numerous examples of vote fraud and vote buying with mail-in ballots in the United States and across the world. Indeed, concerns over vote fraud and vote buying with mail-in ballots causes the vast majority of countries to ban mail-in voting unless the citizen is living abroad.

Most developed countries ban mail-in ballots unless the citizen is living abroad or require Photo-IDs to obtain those ballots. Even higher percentages of European Union or other European countries ban mail-in ballots for in country voters. In addition, some countries that allow voting by mail for citizens living the country don’t allow it for everyone. For example, Japan and Poland have limited mail-in voting to those who have special certificates verifying that they are disabled.

Josh Verges:

Even after losing 37 international students because of visa troubles, Hill-Murray School is full and has a waiting list for the first time in 20 years.

Unlike its neighboring public schools, which are continuing some level of distance learning because of the coronavirus pandemic, the Maplewood Catholic school is fully reopening this week with in-person instruction daily at every grade, 6-12.

“Overwhelmingly, parents are looking for options where kids can be safe, but they want them to come back to school,” President Jim Hansen said.

Work schedules, infection fears and struggles with online learning are forcing parents across the state to reconsider their children’s education options this fall.

Those who are uneasy about returning to school can choose full-time distance learning for the entire school year, which Gov. Tim Walz has ordered every public district and charter school to offer in addition to whichever other modes of instruction the schools pick. Some private schools are offering a distance learning option, too.

But parents who are eager to get back to a normal schedule are unlikely to find it anytime soon in their local public schools.

Sean Coughlin:

Accusations of unfairness over this year’s A-level results in England have focused on an “algorithm” for deciding results of exams cancelled by the pandemic.

This makes it sound Machiavellian and complicated, when perhaps its problems are really being too simplistic.

There have been two key pieces of information used to produce estimated grades: how students have been ranked in ability and how well their school or college has performed in exams in recent years.

So the results were produced by combining the ranking of pupils with the share of grades expected in their school. There were other minor adjustments, but those were the shaping factors.

It meant that at a national level there would be continuity – with this year’s estimated results effectively mirroring the positions of recent years.

Chris Hubbach:

After a spring of pandemic lockdowns and a summer of uncertainty as coronavirus infections surged, working parents with school-age children now face what could be a year of online schooling, presenting a buffet of bad options.

Sacrifice earnings and career advancement to stay home. Hire a nanny, if you can afford it. Lean on elderly relatives. Enroll kids in private schools or expensive day care programs and risk exposing them or others to the disease.

There are no good solutions, and every decision comes with trade-offs.

“There’s no solution that won’t harm someone,” said Hollis Rudiger, a teacher in the Madison School District and mother of two school-age children.

Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:

Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.

Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.

(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.

– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Dahlia Bazzaz:

The district and the union have been discussing work expectations for this fall, sparring over the prospect of some instructors providing in-person services. This marks the third straight summer when bargaining talks have cast doubt over the first day of school.

Robinson denied that the idea of a delayed start was being explored because not enough teachers were trained in the spring and summer.

“There is no tie in to some sort of need to make up for deficiencies over the summer,” he wrote.

The district has offered some opportunities to brush up on skills since the closures. Since spring, over 1,400 educators took a course on Schoology, the district’s learning management system, according to a fall “reopening” plan the district submitted to the state. A few hundred more took different courses on topics like recording videos for the internet and digital citizenship. The union represents about 6,000 SPS employees.

Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:

Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.

Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.

(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.

– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Justice Department:

The Department of Justice today notified Yale University of its findings that Yale illegally discriminates against Asian American and white applicants in its undergraduate admissions process in violation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The findings are the result of a two-year investigation in response to a complaint by Asian American groups concerning Yale’s conduct.

“There is no such thing as a nice form of race discrimination,” said Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband for the Civil Rights Division. “Unlawfully dividing Americans into racial and ethnic blocs fosters stereotypes, bitterness, and division. It is past time for American institutions to recognize that all people should be treated with decency and respect and without unlawful regard to the color of their skin. In 1890, Frederick Douglass explained that the ‘business of government is to hold its broad shield over all and to see that every American citizen is alike and equally protected in his civil and personal rights.’ The Department of Justice agrees and will continue to fight for the civil rights of all people throughout our nation.”

As a condition of receiving millions of dollars in taxpayer funding, Yale expressly agrees to comply with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a cornerstone civil-rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance.

Cathy Ruse & Tony Perkins:

There is no better time to make a change than right now, when public education is in chaos.

What’s that popping sound? Could it be a million figurative lightbulbs clicking on above public-school parents’ heads?

The vast majority of American families send their children to public schools. Only 11 percent of children attend private schools, and fewer than 5 percent are homeschooled. And as one school board after another gives the no go signal for the coming school year, families are being thrown into crisis. And yet, the great American entrepreneurial spirit is awakening as parents are forced to rethink education for their children. And that is to the benefit of children and the nation.

Even before the pandemic, American families had concerns about the quality of education their children were receiving from our public schools. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos called the latest national assessment “devastating.” Two-thirds of American students can’t read at grade level, and reading scores have worsened in 31 states.

The teaching of history has given way to the teaching of social studies, which is now morphing into lessons in civic action from a leftist perspective. A recent study of curriculum in American public schools found that the majority of civics classes teach students how to protest in favor of progressive political causes. Students are not free to disagree.

Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:

Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.

Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.

(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.

– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Joel Kotkin:

 Where there is no bread, there is no Law. Where there is no Law, there is no bread.

— Rabbi Elazar Ben Azariah

Racial identity politics has become the rage in the media, entertainment, and political worlds. You cannot read a mainstream publication, attend a sporting event, or browse a new educational curriculum without running a gauntlet of admonitions about America’s “systemic” racism and how it must be addressed, including through violence.

Millionaire athletes, anchors, non-profits, and corporate executives genuflect to groups like Black Lives Matter, an organization with openly radical, neo-Marxist aims. Yet amidst all this, very little attention has focused on what actually works for minorities who have faced harsh treatment in the past. By focusing largely on white guilt, suggests Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, movements like BLM embrace a form of “egghead racialism” that sees salvation as part of an effort to “strive to be less white,” as if their very pigmentation is a mark of inherent evil.

No doubt this agenda is working profitably for some, such as writers and administrators in the diversity “industry” and even some black fashion designers. But rhetorical genuflecting and quotas for board seats does little to improve the conditions on the ground for the vast majority of historically disadvantaged groups like African-Americans. As John McWhorter pointed out in the Atlantic, the idea that black progress relies largely on addressing white sinfulness seems an extreme form of “dehumanizing condescension” that robs Blacks, and other minorities, of any agency outside protest or destruction and does little to address the underlying causes of despair.

What works? A historical perspective

Gloria Reyes:

We must prepare and implement a plan of action to prevent violence and to stop this horrific rise in violence.”

David Blaska:

Our word of the day is ‘Chutzpah’

(Yiddish for “what nerve!”)

This is the school board president who kicked cops out of
Madison’s troubled high schools

NEWS ALERT:

Detectives from the MPD’s Violent Crime Unit, the MPD’s Gang Unit, with assistance from many MPD officers, have arrested two Madison teens in the murder of 11-year-old Anisa Scott.

Andre P. Brown, age 16, was arrested on Northport Drive earlier today. Perion R. Carreon, age 19, was arrested Wednesday, for an unrelated crime, while driving a stolen car on Thierer Rd. Carreon had a loaded handgun in his waistband at the time of his apprehension.

‘Please protect my child from Andre Brown’

2½ years ago a parent asked Madison schools to refer

Brown to delinquency court.

The same André Brown, age 16, now in jail for his alleged part in the

08-11-2020  shooting death of Anisa Maria Scott, age 11.

Sat, August 15, 2020 at 3:36 PM

To: Kelly M Ruppel, MMSD Chief of Staff

Ms. Ruppel,

Below is an email string establishing that you were long aware that André Brown had perpetrated criminal acts upon my child and others in his classroom, that you were aware that Andre was an out-of-control thug, that you attempted to gaslight me, that you were aware that the so-called principal at Sherman wasn’t doing her job, that my family incurred very significant financial expense on the part of André Brown, and that your district’s so-called behavior-education plan wasn’t working.

As I stated to you two and a half years ago regarding André (whose behavior I had started reporting to the MMSD four and a half years ago: … A “Behavior” plan isn’t going to cure the conduct of a kid who has a brain problem and whose parents are ineffective.

Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:

Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.

Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.

(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.

– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Jonathan Turley:

The law has always drawn a line between malfeasance and nonfeasance in considering unlawful acts, but Syracuse University is about to eradicate any real distinction in newly proposed rules by Professor Keith Alford, the university first diversity an inclusion officer. Under the new rules, students would be punished for simply witnessing “bias-motivated” incidents and “acts of hate.” The change was demanded by the #NotAgainSU which demanded expulsion for “individuals who witnessed the event or were present, but did not take part.”

Jacob Helberg:

In 2011, then-President Barack Obama attended an intimate dinner in Silicon Valley. At one point, he turned to the man on his left. What would it take, Obama asked Steve Jobs, for Apple to manufacture its iPhones in the United States instead of China? Jobs was unequivocal: “Those jobs aren’t coming back.” Jobs’s prognostication has become almost an article of faith among policymakers and corporate leaders throughout the United States. Yet China’s recent weaponization of supply chains and information networks exposes the grave dangers of the American deindustrialization that Jobs accepted as inevitable.

Since March alone, China has threatened to withhold medical equipment from the United States and Europe during the coronavirus pandemic; launched the biggest cyberattack against Australia in the country’s history; hacked U.S. firms to acquire secrets related to the coronavirus vaccine; and engaged in massive disinformation campaigns on a global scale. China even hacked the Vatican. These incidents reflect the power China wields through its control of supply chains and information hardware. They show the peril of ceding control of vast swaths of the world’s manufacturing to a regime that builds at home, and exports abroad, a model of governance that is fundamentally in conflict with American values and democracies everywhere. And they pale in comparison to what China will have the capacity to do as its confrontation with the United States sharpens.

The question today is not whether America’s manufacturing jobs can return, but whether America can afford not to bring them back.

Scott Girard:

More than twice as many Wisconsin families as a year ago have told the state they plan to homeschool for the 2020-21 school year.

According to data from the state Department of Public Instruction, 1,661 families filed forms to homeschool between July 1 and Aug. 6, up from 727 during the same period a year ago and 599 two years ago. The number of students in those families is up to 2,792 from 1,279 last year and 1,088 two years ago.

The same is true locally, as 122 Dane County families with 202 students filed forms in that period, up from 55 and 80 last year.

Michelle Yoo, the administrator of the Madison Area Homeschoolers Facebook page, said she’s seen evidence of the uptick in interest.

“When Madison announced they were doing online school, I think I had about 100 requests to join in about a two-week period,” Yoo said. “I can’t tell you what I used to get, but it was nowhere near 100.”

With those students go funding, as district revenue limits and state aid both depend on enrollment. The Madison Metropolitan School District discouraged parents from leaving to homeschool or attend a private school in its Aug. 7 family newsletter, citing that funding loss.

Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:

Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.

Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.

(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.

– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Donovan Harrell:

UPMC removed Norman Wang, a cardiologist and an associate professor of Medicine, from a fellowship program after he penned a “white paper” criticizing affirmative action efforts in the medical field. 

Wang was removed by UPMC from his position as program director of the Electrophysiology Fellowship following social media backlash against the paper.

In the paper, originally published in the Journal of the American Heart Association on March 24, Wang argued that affirmative action efforts through diversity, inclusion and equity in medicine have been largely unsuccessful because of a “limited qualified applicant pool and legal challenges to the use of race and ethnicity in admissions to institutions of higher education.”

“Ultimately, all who aspire to a profession in medicine and cardiology must be assessed as individuals on the basis of their personal merits, not their racial and ethnic identities,” Wang said.

Wang also said in the paper that there “exists no empirical evidence by accepted standards for causal inference to support the mantra that ‘diversity saves lives.’”

In his conclusion, he said, “long-term academic solutions and excellence should not be sacrificed for short-term demographic optics.” Wang said racial and ethnic preferences for undergraduate and medical school admissions should be dismissed by 2028.

Logan Wroge:

“I have to address that because if you look at the data on the elementary level, we need to focus on literacy, we need to focus on numeracy, we need to focus on our special ed, our (English-language learners),” Jenkins said in the interview.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

via Simpson Street Free Press

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Faye Flam:

“The issue with data is one can manipulate it to show anything you want if you have an agenda,” says YouYang Gu, an independent data scientist. Cherry picking is easy — prediction is much harder, and Gu is getting some attention for the fact that models he’s been creating since April actually forecast what’s happened with the spread of the disease in the U.S.

He recently took to Twitter to urge public health officials to apply scientific thinking. He pointed to data on Louisiana, where cases were rising earlier in the summer and seemed to level off after various counties issued mask mandates.

But breaking the data down by county, he says, revealed a different story. Mask mandates varied in their timing, but places that implemented them late saw no more cases or deaths than those that did so early. “I don’t think there’s currently enough evidence to support the fact that recent policy interventions (mask mandates, bar closures) were the main drivers behind the recent decrease in cases,” he wrote.

That’s not to say that individual behavior doesn’t matter a lot — and the cancellation of big gatherings and other potential super-spreading events is more important than ever — but there may be more factors than we know driving the bigger picture.

A few scientists are examining the possibility that previously hard-hit areas are now being affected by a buildup of immunity, even if it flies in the face of the widespread understanding that the disease has to run through at least 60% of the population to achieve so-called herd immunity. (So far, antibody tests show only some 10-20% of the U.S. population has had the disease.)

The term herd immunity is a little vague in this context. It was created to characterize the impact of immunization. It refers to the percentage of the population that must get immunized in order for a pathogen to die out — a quantity that depends on the nature of the virus, the efficacy of the vaccine and the behavior of the hosts. If natural immunity is starting to help in some places, that would suggest herd immunity is a reasonable and worthy goal of an immunization program.

Related:

2005: “When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before”

2006: Math Forum

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

2019: Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district’s graduation data rhetoric (and reality).

CBS2

The Ronald McDonald House in Streeterville was among the establishments targeted during looting in Chicago early Monday morning.

The facility provides a home and resources to families while a child receives treatment at local hospitals.

Vandals struck the facility at 211 E. Grand Ave. near Lurie Children’s Hospital as families were sleeping inside. Several windows were smashed, and the front door had to be boarded up.

For a while, residents were placed on lockdown while the commotion was happening right outside.

Naomi Bardach:

As a pediatrician, I love treating children, but I am well aware that the urgent care clinic where I work is not germ-free. Inevitably, I catch the occasional bug from a kid with a runny nose and a cough.

When the coronavirus pandemic began, I worried that I would treat children who were asymptomatic or mildly ill (“just a cold”), then get the virus myself and spread it to my parents or friends. Many teachers who are about to return to school have the same worries.

But we have known for months that the coronavirus does not act like normal cough and cold viruses that we often catch from children. In a surprise to pediatricians, teachers and parents alike, the virus behaves the opposite of what we are used to. Children and adolescents do not seem to get sick with Covid-19 as frequently as adults. And children, especially elementary school-aged children, do not seem to transmit it effectively to one another, nor to adults.

This has been documented in countries around the world, including Greece, Switzerland and Australia. Even when schools are open, most children who get ill are found to have been infected by someone in their household, not from a school contact.

These data put into context a recent study of 145 children and adults in Chicago in March and April that was widely reported. It found that young, symptomatic children had more of the virus in their noses than adults. Some speculated that this meant that the children could spread it as easily as adults. But the study was small and didn’t actually measure transmission; we learn much more useful information from the global data, which show it is unlikely that the increased viral load translates to increased infectiousness.

Brian Barth:

In October 2017, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke at a VIP-laden press event in Toronto to announce plans for a new neighborhood in the city to be built “from the internet up.” The big reveal was the builder: Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Alphabet, the parent company of Google. The mood was festive, optimistic. Schoolchildren were on hand with Lego models of future cityscapes, which Trudeau, flanked by Eric Schmidt, Alphabet’s then–executive chairman, and John Tory, the Toronto mayor, explored in a flawlessly staged photo op.

The prime minister spoke in earnest tones. Quayside, as the 12-acre waterfront project had been christened, would be “a testbed for new technologies,” he said, “that will help us build smarter, greener, more inclusive cities.” Not one to shy away from wholesome platitudes, he added, “The future, just like this community, will be interconnected.”

Then Schmidt rose to the lectern and said that Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had long opined about “all of these things that we could do if someone would just give us a city and put us in charge.” Chuckles reverberated through the crowd.

News that Alphabet had leaped neck deep into the smart city business lit up tech media for weeks. Sidewalk Labs’ renderings for the project — autonomous carts delivering packages and hauling away waste maneuvered in underground tunnels, while barefoot kids, butterflies, and birds cavorted in a Jetsons-meets-organic-living neighborhood at street level — flashed across the internet. Local news stations covered the project dotingly, picking up the Sidewalk Labs talking point that a network of sensors and other IT infrastructure embedded in the community would enable a new era of urban efficiency. Homes and workplaces in Quayside would “study occupants’ behavior while they’re inside them to make life easier,” said a reporter on one evening broadcast after the press event. Quayside would be “the first neighborhood of its kind,” he said, and — as if one superlative wasn’t enough — it would be “a community like none other.”

Many taxpayer supported K-12 school districts use Google services, including Madison.

Steven Elbow:

The coronavirus pandemic has a lot of people feeling boxed in. But for Michelle Possin it opened up a whole new realm of possibilities.

Before the COVID-19 crisis, the 54-year-old recruiter for TASC, a Madison-based administrative services company, spent half her time at home and the other half in the office. But now the company has nixed office work altogether, freeing employees to work from wherever they choose. So she sold her condo on the Isthmus and bought a house on Lake Wisconsin, giving her room for an office, a yard and, when the time comes, a place to retire.

“Living and working from a condo was not sustainable,” she said. “It was extremely small, and I felt very claustrophobic being there all the time.”

It was a life-changing decision to flee the city for more rural environs where Possin can spread out with twice the square footage of her condo, enjoy the lake and entertain at safe social distances outdoors, the kind of lifestyle that many crave, and more are finding within reach.

“There are quite a few people in my company who are moving because now they can work from anywhere,” she said. “One of my colleagues just moved to Colorado.”

Real estate agents across the country are noticing the trend. Untethered from the office and emboldened by historically low interest rates, telecommuters from the Bay Area to the East Coast are starting to look to the countryside, where they can have larger homes, bigger yards and a quieter life to raise their families.

Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:

Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.

Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.

(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.

– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Scott Girard:

In his first week, the former Memorial High School associate principal said he learned that there are “just a bunch of wonderful people” in Madison.

“This energy that’s happening right now from people inside the district and outside the district, really wanting Madison to move forward,” Jenkins said. “There’s a momentum, and people just want to build on that momentum.”

[‘I believe Dr. Carlton Jenkins gets it’: On first day, superintendent helps rebuild a parent’s trust]

He’s having to feel that momentum and meet the community in creative ways, with virtual meetings remaining the safest due to COVID-19. He said that while he is a “human relations” person who misses handshakes and seeing people’s body language when talking, it’s also likely “giving me an opportunity really to see probably more people than I would’ve normally seen during this time.”

“This is the same thing that transfers over, not just work relationships but when we have our students,” Jenkins said. “We’re missing our students as part of what we do. We’re in the human connection business.”

In navigating his own district through “crisis mode” this spring, including a shift to virtual learning, Jenkins said he saw how key good communication was for the social-emotional well-being of both students and staff. He held more frequent full-staff meetings, he said, and worked quickly to get students that didn’t previously have devices online.

“We had to get devices for the young children because they were crying missing the teachers and the teachers were crying missing the students,” he said.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Peter Greene:

But there’s an even bigger issue, and that’s the continued unquestioning use of these test scores as a proxy for the larger picture of student achievement and teacher effectiveness. It’s a mistake repeated by countless education journalists, researchers and policy wonks. It’s a quick and easy shorthand, but it’s inaccurate and misleading.

We should just stop. Instead of saying, “Strategy X was found to have a positive affect on student achievement,” we should say “Strategy X helped raise test scores.” Instead of saying, “Technique Z led to improved reading by third graders,” we should say, “Technique Z led to improved reading test scores for third graders.”

It’s not that we shouldn’t discuss standardized test results, but we should stop pretending that they represent some larger truth. We should call them by their name — not “student achievement” or “effective instruction” or “high-quality school” but simply “scores on the standardized test.” By using lazy substitution, we end up like a tourist sitting beside the Grand Canyon looking at a handful of pebbles and imagining that those pebbles tell us everything we need to know about the vast beautiful vista that we are not bothering to see.

After all, if I told you that my child achieved great things in school this year, your first thought would not be, “Oh, good test scores!” Let’s use words to mean what they actually mean.

I spent 39 years as a high school English teacher, looking at how hot new reform policies affect the classroom.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Steven Hayward:

I’ve been tempted to tweak my liberal friends with the mischievous thought that COVID-19 is actually a Trump five-dimensional chess plot to destroy universities, unionized K-12 public education, and Hollywood (since TV and movie production is largely shut down too).

Colleges and universities were already facing mounting financial pressure because enrollment is steadily declining and certain to get much worse in the coming decade (the result of falling birthrates back at the time of the housing crash in 2008-09). Add to this the financial hit they are taking right now because of the virus, on top of the huge loss this year of foreign students who typically pay full tuition rates and subsidize other students, and a large number of colleges and universities face a serious risk of insolvency. (There are  many colleges for whom a large foreign student enrollment—especially Chinese students—is a key part of their business model.) This week it is reported that 20 percent of Harvard freshmen are deferring a year; at other colleges, the rate of students saying they aren’t returning runs as high as 40 percent. At places further down the food chain than Harvard, how many students will decide not to go to college at all a year from now?

Now add today’s news that major college football isn’t going to happen, and you have the making of a death spiral for many colleges. Even schools that aren’t football powerhouses like Ohio State are going to take a huge hit from this, as football even at second-tier universities is still a money maker. Ticket sales and TV revenues are one thing; football, and to a lesser extent basketball, are huge magnets for alumni donations, and if there’s no football, there’s no fancy skybox game day parties for college presidents to schmooze donors. And since huge football revenues cross-subsidize all the other sports, look for the sports portfolios of many colleges to collapse. Some schools, like Stanford, have already cut a large number of sports.

Binyamin Appelbaum:

In Columbus, Ohio, judges have relocated eviction hearings to the cavernous halls of the city’s convention center, to ensure there’s plenty of space for the grim business of throwing families onto the street.

In New Orleans, piles of personal belongings on sidewalks — “eviction cairns,” in the haunting phrase of Sue Mobley, a member of the city’s planning commission — are an increasingly common sight.

In Savannah, Ga., the county sheriff, John Wilcher, announced at the start of the month that he would begin moving forward with about 500 pending evictions. Mr. Wilcher told reporters that he hadn’t carried out evictions for the last five months, but that “people after five months should have been able to come up with some kind of deal or something to help themselves out where they wouldn’t be evicted.” The sheriff didn’t offer any pointers on how to find a job in the midst of a pandemic.

The last time the economy went over the cliff’s edge, in 2008, the federal government encased the banking system in plastic Bubble Wrap and allowed millions of Americans to lose their homes. It’s about to make the same mistake all over again.

Tanwell Hobbs:

Schools superintendent Michael Hinojosa stepped on a land mine while laying plans to reopen his 153,000-student district amid the coronavirus pandemic. He wanted teachers instructing from classrooms, even if students were at home, to make sure they stayed focused.

“It is better for us if they come in,” Dr. Hinojosa said from his office at Dallas Independent School District headquarters late last month. “It is unprofessional if kids are yelling in the background, dogs barking and husbands walking back and forth.”

The teachers’ response was swift and clear: His approach would gamble with their lives as Covid-19 runs rampant in the area, citing an Arizona teacher’s recent death as an example.

After consulting a county leader, Dr. Hinojosa changed his stance. He would now allow teachers to apply to work from home if they had reliable internet and minimal distractions. He asked a staffer to write new language. “I don’t want to have a firestorm,” he said.

Scott Girard:

Jane Belmore retired in 2005 after nearly three decades as a Madison teacher and principal. That wasn’t the end of her career with the Madison Metropolitan School District: She’s since been asked twice to lead when the district found itself between superintendents. Both turned out to be pivotal moments for the district.

Cap Times K-12 education reporter Scott Girard got an exclusive interview with Belmore as she was wrapping up her most recent year as interim superintendent. Today on the podcast, he talks about the expected and unexpected challenges this year brought, and why Belmore was willing to take them

Teachers have access to materials in their classrooms that are not available at home,” – despite million$ spent on Infinite Campus

Costs continue to grow for local, state and federal taxpayers in the K-12 space, as well:

Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:

Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.

Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.

(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.

– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Jane Belmore notes and links.

Scott Girard:

Options at the new school under the recommendation would include designating it as a Community School — the district has four of those now — or creating specific programming like social-emotional learning, social justice or environmental education. Other ideas could still be added to that list as the planning process continues.

Teachers have access to materials in their classrooms that are not available at home,” – despite million$ spent on Infinite Campus

Costs continue to grow for local, state and federal taxpayers in the K-12 space, as well:

Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:

Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.

Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.

(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.

– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Brittney Martin:

Though Lee struggled with her online classes last semester, Garcia plans to keep her home again this fall. Lee has asthma, as does her nineteen-year-old sister, who contracted COVID-19 in June and narrowly avoided having to be admitted to the hospital as she struggled to breathe. Garcia has once again requested a hot spot from the district. 

For those students whose needs are not met by the program, Rowe insists that this is just the beginning. “Those are the districts where we really need to dig deeper into the analytics and figure out who else has need,” Rowe said. “This isn’t going to be it. We won’t be done. We’ve just got to figure out how to peel back the next layer now.”

“Teachers have access to materials in their classrooms that are not available at home,” – despite million$ spent on Infinite Campus

Costs continue to grow for local, state and federal taxpayers in the K-12 space, as well:

Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:

Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.

Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.

(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.

– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Lucas Kunce:

Last night (Thursday), President Trump signed an executive order banning the Chinese owned video-sharing app TikTok from the United States over national security concerns. This announcement came on the heels of a House Antitrust Subcommittee hearing on the power of Big Tech, where the CEOs of Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Apple faced scrutiny from policymakers and the public for being too powerful and oppressive. 

At that hearing, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg hammered home the American-ness of his company and the threat from China to the internet, specifically mentioning TikTok as the fastest growing app in the US.  

The meaning was clear, and echoed points Zuckerberg made during one of his previous appearances before Congress: Big Tech is essential to fight Chinese platforms like TikTok that can spy on Americans and whose opaque algorithms could be used to conduct malicious activities like censoring political content and potentially impacting an election.   

The most common solution proposed for the situation is for one of the big US tech companies to save the popular app—and all of us— from Chinese overwatch by purchasing TikTok. Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Apple have all been suggested, although Microsoft appears to be at the top of the list.  

The idea that big tech companies can defend us against China has gained momentum over the last year, as monopolists have turned to the use of national security talking points to push back against their critics. Both former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, for example, cited competition with China as a reason to preserve US tech monopolies, rather than break them up. We need large tech companies, this line of argument goes, as “national champions” who will take on China and its national champions in the tech sphere. Far from breaking them up, these companies and their army of lobbyists say, we should protect, empower, and celebrate their concentrated power for the sake of American security.

Adrian Humphreys:

Emergency isolation orders, border closures, social distancing and mandated lockdowns are inconvenient and costly, but, it is hoped, it will at least test theories like never before of why crime really happens and how it can be predicted and reduced.

The COVID-19 pandemic is “the largest criminological experiment in history,” according to influential American criminologist Marcus Felson. “It’s like a natural lab,” Felson says in an interview — and we are all test subjects locked in this dystopian exploration.

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“The ‘stay-at-home’ mandates brought about the most wide-reaching, significant, and sudden alteration of the lives of billions of people in human history,” Felson, a professor at Texas State University, wrote in a recent paper rallying criminologists around the world to aggressively seize opportunity from tragedy.

The pandemic certainly has some collateral damage to folks’ levels of stress and strain

“Practically overnight, the entire country ceased or significantly reduced day-to-day travels, eliminating commutes from home to work, as well as leisure activities, shopping trips, social gatherings, the ability to dine out, and more.

Joy Pullman:

Prominent Democrat politicians have started making huge concessions on reopening schools. Back in May, Democrats pounced after President Trump supported reopening. Despite the data finding precisely the opposite, it quickly became the Democrat-media complex line that opening schools this fall would be preposterously dangerous to children and teachers.

In July, when New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled a plan to put the city’s 1.1 million school kids back in schools half the week and “online learning” the rest of the week, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo picked a public fight with him, saying, “If anybody sat here today and told you that they could reopen the school in September, that would be reckless and negligent of that person.”

Then on Friday, Cuomo cleared schools to open this fall, just a few weeks after making uncertain noises about the prospect as teachers unions breathed down his neck. That same day, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Senate’s minority leader, joined the Democrat messaging reversal:

Sen. Chuck Schumer: “If we don’t open up the schools, you’re going to hurt the economy significantly.” pic.twitter.com/Ne5znhvk2y

— The Hill (@thehill) August 7, 2020

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tucked the posture shift into a Saturday response to Trump’s latest executive orders, saying “these announcements do…nothing to reopen schools,” as if Democrats have been all along supporting school reopenings instead of the opposite. Just a few weeks ago, Pelosi was on TV bashing Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos for encouraging school reopenings, saying, falsely, “Going back to school presents the biggest risk for the spread of the coronavirus. They ignore science and they ignore governance in order to make this happen.”

What gives? For one thing, New York’s richest people have fled during the lockdowns. If their kids’ tony public schools don’t offer personal instruction or look likely to maintain the chaos of rolling lockdown brownouts, those wealthy people have better choices. They can stay in their vacation houses or newly bought mansions in states that aren’t locked down. They can hire pod teachers or private schools.

And the longer they stay outside New York City and start to make friends and get used to a new place, the less likely they are to ever return. Cuomo is well aware of this.

“I literally talk to people all day long who are now in their Hamptons house who also lived here, or in their Hudson Valley house, or in their Connecticut weekend house, and I say, ‘You got to come back! We’ll go to dinner! I’ll buy you a drink! Come over, I’ll cook!’” Cuomo revealed in a recent news conference. “They’re not coming back right now. And you know what else they’re thinking? ‘If I stay there, I’ll pay a lower income tax,’ because they don’t pay the New York City surcharge.”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Fairfax County Schools:

Across the country, many parents are joining together to engage private tutors (who are often school teachers) to provide tutoring or home instruction for small groups of children. While there is no systematic way to track these private efforts, it’s clear that a number of “pandemic pods” or tutoring pods are being established in Fairfax County. 

We are aware of these tutoring pods, as well as some accompanying community concerns. To be clear, these instructional efforts are not supported by or in any way controlled by FCPS—for several reasons:

•    These are purely private initiatives on the part of parents and families. Families have an absolute right to work together and pool resources to provide instruction or tutoring—just as they do to pool resources and provide private daycare, music lessons, or recreational activities for their children—but tutoring pods are not part of the public school system.

•    Under the terms of their contracts, FCPS teachers are allowed to provide tutoring services for reimbursement, but only as long as they meet these conditions:

• Teachers must make it clear that the services are being provided as an independent contractor, and not as an employee of FCPS.

• They cannot tutor children for private compensation if the same children are receiving instruction from them in FCPS schools (i.e., the children cannot be in their classes). That’s true for private tutoring or group instruction in any location.

• They cannot engage in outside instruction or any preparation for it during their FCPS work hours.

While FCPS doesn’t and can’t control these private tutoring groups, we do have concerns that they may widen the gap in educational access and equity for all students. Many parents cannot afford private instruction. Many working families can’t provide transportation to and from a tutoring pod, even if they could afford to pay for the service.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Kwame Sarfo-Mensah:

My educational journey started as a special education student, a label that I would maintain throughout my elementary school years. From first to fourth grade, I attended Laurel Elementary School in Bloomfield, CT.  Although I appreciated the education I received at Laurel, my time at the school came with many personal challenges. The lingering stigma of being a special education student contributed to my inability to connect socially with other children.

The mistreatment I received from the mainstream students made me fully aware of where I stood within the school’s social hierarchy. I felt like a second-class citizen within my own school. Being a second-class citizen meant I wasn’t “cool enough” to sit with the popular kids during lunchtime. It also meant being subjected to a barrage of jokes about my significantly darker skin color and West African heritage. I remember being called names such as “Yoo-Hoo,” “Black & Crispy,” and “Hershey’s Chocolatey”—all because I was so much darker in complexion than most of the kids in school. The Lion King jokes were a huge hit with the crowd and they certainly made it a point to run those jokes into the ground. Even at home, my father was infamous for calling me “Stuuuupid” every time I made a mistake or said something that he thought was dumb. 

It’s been 26 years since I’ve occupied a special education classroom and, yet, these painful words still linger in my mind. At 37 years old, I’m a two-time college graduate, a husband, father, author, entrepreneur and a successful educator. With that resume, I should be able to sit back, reflect on my accomplishments and be in awe at how far I’ve come, right?  

As much as I’d love to do that, the truth is I can’t because eight-year old Kwame still occupies real estate in the depths of my psyche. He still serves as that chip on my shoulder that won’t allow me to be fulfilled with what I’ve accomplished. He still cries whenever he hears whispers of dark-skinned jokes from his classmates and the crippling insults from his father.   

Jill Tucker and Annie Vainshtein:

Joy Ghansah’s image froze, her face in a perpetual smile as her online class of Oakland kindergartners waited for her to say something, to talk about the stuffed animal in her lap or to read them a book.

The little girl wearing a tiara squirmed. The little boy in a superhero suit fidgeted. Another boy hid behind his mom’s long hair.

David Randall:

“I’ve always said that the ‘1619 Project’ is not a history,” Hannah-Jones said in a series of tweets. “It is a work of journalism that explicitly seeks to challenge the national narrative and, therefore, the national memory. The project has always been as much about the present as it is the past.”

Nevertheless, the “1619 Project” has had a profound impact on America’s schools. 

School districts in cities ranging from Buffalo to Chicago to Newark to Washington immediately announced that they would incorporate the “1619 Project” into their school history curriculums—using a “1619 Project” curriculum that the Pulitzer Center posted to the internet as soon as the Times published the special edition of its Sunday magazine last year. The Pulitzer Center claims more than 3,500 classrooms have adopted their curriculum. 

Clearly, the project’s creators of the “1619 Project” had coordinated with the Pulitzer Center and school district leaders to transform the nation’s curricula immediately—without bothering to wait for input from parents, school boards, or historians. 

The “1619 Project” was meant to be a revolution from above, imposed on America’s children to teach them to despise their country.

Adrianne Jeffries:

As Google faces at least four major antitrust investigations on two continents, internal documents obtained by The Markup show its parent company, Alphabet, has been preparing for this moment for years, telling employees across the massive enterprise that certain language is off limits in all written communications, no matter how casual.

The taboo words include “market,” “barriers to entry,” and “network effects,” which is when products such as social networks become more valuable as more people use them.

“Words matter. Especially in antitrust law,” reads one document titled “Five Rules of Thumb for Written Communications.”

“Alphabet gets sued a lot, and we have our fair share of regulatory investigations,” reads another. “Assume every document will become public.”

The internal documents appear to be part of a self-guided training session for a wide range of the company’s more than 100,000 employees, from engineers to salespeople. One document, titled “Global Competition Policy,” says it applies not only to interns and employees but also to temps, vendors, and contractors.

The documents explain the basics of antitrust law and caution against loose talk that could have implications for government regulators or private lawsuits.

Many taxpayer supported school districts use Google services, including Madison.

Sarah Downey:

It’s only in a totalitarian state where everyone appears to agree on hard topics. If you look around you and see that, it means people are silencing themselves or being silenced. Neither one is okay.

I’ve been silencing myself, but I’m done. Critical thinking, rational thought, and individual courage are how we escape the Orwellian nightmare we’re heading into. Censorship and control is not acceptable, even in the name of social justice. It’s time to stand up.

Have strong opinions, loosely held; maintain that looseness so you can modify your opinions when confronted with new information that you deem worthy. Only a fool blindly clings to his opinions in the face of new, possibly conflicting information. Be a critical thinker, not a zealot. You have the mental fortitude to sit across from an opposing idea, or a person who disagrees with you, and hear it. It will not infect you without your consent. You can choose what to believe.

Avik Roy:

Every American has a stake in the ongoing debate over how, when and if to reopen schools this fall. Last spring’s pandemic-driven closures affected 62 million pre-primary, primary and secondary school students, not to mention their parents.

With the arrival of the school year, the temperature of the debate has risen. The second-largest teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers, is preparing for its members to go on strike if schools reopen without their assent. President Trump has expressed a desire to “cut off funding”..

Lionel Shriver:

There’s nothing unprecedented about Covid-19 itself. The equally novel, equally infectious Asian flu of 1957 had commensurate fatalities in Britain: scaled up for today’s population, the equivalent of 42,000, while the UK’s (statistically flawed) Covid death total now stands at 46,000. Globally, the Asian flu was vastly more lethal, causing between two and four million deaths. The Hong Kong flu of 1968-69 also slew up to four million people worldwide, including 80,000 Britons. Yet in both instances, life went on.

What is unprecedented: never has a virus been so oversold. Why, I’d like to sign on with Covid’s agent. What a publicity budget.

In a recent Kekst CNC poll, British respondents estimated that nearly 7 per cent of the UK population has died from the coronavirus. That would be 4.5 million people. Scots supposed that more than 10 per cent of the UK population has died. That would be seven million people. Astonishingly, Americans believed that Covid has killed 9 per cent of their compatriots, or almost 30 million people! The real US total has indeed crossed the milestone of 150,000, but for pity’s sake, ‘only’ 20 million people died in the first world war.

True, your average everyman and woman are not dab hands at statistics. Nevertheless, broadcast news has bludgeoned audiences daily with Covid death totals. And a citizenry ought to have some vague notion of their country’s population. So folks convinced that in five meagre months they’ve lost a tenth of their fellows — the literal meaning of the word ‘decimate’ — need only drop a digit to realise how absurdly their bloated estimate compares with familiar figures on the news. But then, the public is never good with zeroes — a failing which treasuries in deficit count on.

Our very own Matthew Parris (many of whose columns I admire) is not immune to Covid Hyperbole Syndrome. His last column alludes to this virus ‘killing millions worldwide’, a phrase that sailed unmolested past pernickety editors and fact-checkers at this magazine. But the true worldwide death toll at the time was about 650,000.

I’d argue for improved British education in maths, except it seems Britain doesn’t do education any more. So let’s instead take those exaggerated impressions of lethality as proof of a stupendously successful propaganda campaign. The government has destroyed the country, and needs to keep ramping up the hysteria the better to keep destroying it. Boris Johnson gets a lot of stick, so it’s time to give the boy credit for once. At destroying the country he’s doing a damned fine job.

During events that in the present loom distortingly large, I’m always dubious of assertions that ‘nothing will ever be the same again’. Yet I worry that Covid-19 may have issued in a new intolerance for the nature of biology that could prove long-lasting.

Wikipedia:

The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly paradoxical idea that, “In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.” Popper expands upon this, writing, “I do not imply for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force…”

Emily Hanford:

Sonya Thomas knew something wasn’t right with her son C.J. He was in first grade and he was struggling with reading. “Something was going on with him, but I could not figure it out,” she said. 

Teachers and school officials told her that C.J. was behind but would catch up. They told Sonya to read to him at home. But she did read to him. C.J. liked the Veggie Tales stories and “The Big Friendly Giant” by Roald Dahl. His older sister read the Goosebumps books to him. 

C.J. went to Amqui Elementary, a public school in Nashville, Tennessee, where 80 percent of the students were Black or Hispanic and almost all of them were from low-income families. Test scores show most children in the school were struggling with reading. But Sonya didn’t know that. She sent C.J. to Amqui because she liked the school and it’s where her best friend’s son went; her friend picked the kids up after school because Sonya worked late as a nurse. 

C.J. is the youngest of Sonya’s four kids. The three older ones had no trouble learning to read but something was different with C.J. “I started asking myself, does he have a learning disability?” She sent a handwritten note to the school, requesting that he be tested. Records show the school didn’t do it. 

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

RR Reno:

Congress is deadlocked over a $1 trillion coronavirus relief bill. As our representatives hash out their differences, I’d like to propose they carefully consider how to distribute relief funds for higher education. (I draw some of these ideas from “Critical Care: Policy Recommendations to Restore American Higher Education After the 2020 Coronavirus Shutdown,” a position paper from the National Association of Scholars.)

Most important: Avoid shoveling money into the super-rich colleges and universities. The 2017 tax bill established a tax on income earned by gigantic university endowments. Institutions enrolling 500 or more students that have $500,000 or more in endowment principal per student are subject to a 1.4 percent tax on their endowment income. Congress should use the same metric of endowment wealth to determine which colleges and university receive relief funds. None that have endowments above $500,000 per student should receive federal money.

In recent decades, higher education has been bloated with money from federally guaranteed student loans. At the same time, a generation of young people has been saddled with debt. It’s past time for institutions to put some skin in the game. Colleges and universities that accept relief funds must be held liable for a significant percent of the principal of student loan defaults.

Legislators should avoid the temptation to “save the system.” It’s a broken system, one built on an unrealistic and harmful “college for all” approach. This mentality has led us to over-invest in higher education and shortchange vocational education. To make things worse, over the last generation the American taxpayer has increasingly subsidized the graduate training of foreign students, not American students. The relief bill should reverse this trend, giving priority to community colleges that serve American citizens rather than universities that position themselves as global institutions.

Elite scientists at American universities receive generous pay—and hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Chinese Thousand Talents program. This double game has to stop. Our universities enjoy extraordinary tax advantages and receive federal support through many mechanisms. The American taxpayer should not be asked to subsidize the transfer of intellectual and technological leadership to China. No college or university that employs a professor who has received money from the Thousand Talents or similar programs should receive relief funds.

Kurt Anderson:

I also thought: Mea culpa. For those past two decades, I’d prospered and thrived in the new political economy. And unharmed by automation or globalization or the new social contract, I’d effectively ignored the fact that the majority of my fellow Americans weren’t prospering or thriving.

In 40 years, the share of wealth owned by our richest 1 percent has doubled, the collective net worth of the bottom half has dropped to almost zero, the median weekly pay for a full-time worker has increased by just 0.1 percent a year, only the incomes of the top 10 percent have grown in sync with the economy, and so on. Americans’ boats stopped rising together; most of our boats stopped rising at all. Economic inequality has reverted to the levels of a century ago and earlier, and so has economic insecurity, while economic immobility is almost certainly worse than it’s ever been.

What’s happened since the 1970s and ’80s didn’t just happen. It looks more like arson than a purely accidental fire, more like poisoning than a completely natural illness, more like a cheating of the many by the few—and although I’ve always been predisposed to disbelieve conspiracy theories, this amounts to a long-standing and well-executed conspiracy, not especially secret, by the leaders of the capitalist class, at the expense of everyone else. A Raw Deal replaced the New Deal. And I and my cohort of hippie-to-yuppie liberal Baby Boomers were complicit in that.

The Yuppies Versus the Proles

At a dinner during my first visit to Washington, D.C., in June 1972—on the very evening of the Watergate break-in, as it happened—a mod young Department of Education bureaucrat informed me that the liberal political era in America was ending. To a 17-year-old fresh from Nebraska looking forward to wearing my McGovern for President button to a White House reception with Vice President Spiro Agnew the next day, this was a shocking revelation.

The guy turned out to be right, of course. And that fall, when I started college, I saw firsthand that the youthquake and student movement and greening of America, everything I’d spent the past few years getting stoked about, was palpably, rapidly ending. The Vietnam War was winding down and nobody was getting drafted, so fighting the Man started to seem like a pose. My senior thesis argued that more and more white-collar jobs, thanks in part to technology, were apt to become more and more proletarian, and it discussed whether workers in such professions might follow the lead of federal air traffic controllers, who had recently unionized.

Cliff Maas:

Update2:  There is a major error in the Seattle Times story.  My original blog never criticized the protesters or BLM activists.  My criticisms were limited to VIOLENT individuals who destroy property and hurt people.  Please read my original blog if you want to confirm this.  Some folks are choosing to misinterpret my words.

Update3:  There are two types of mobs.  First, mobs the hurt people and destroy property.  Second, there are social media mobs that attempt to destroy those they disagree with or attack different viewpoints.  We have seen both types of mobs here in Seattle during the past months.  Neither is good.

Take a walk around downtown Seattle.  You will be shocked by a shuttered, dystopian city and made angry by the inaction and ineptness of its political leadership.   It is simply beyond words.

Cliff Mass Notes and links, including math issues.

More:

“I was simply saying that the people who were doing violence were acting like the Brownshirts,” he added. “Peaceful protesters are fine, that is protected speech. But it’s the violence: That’s what’s wrong.”

Shortly after Mass’s blog was published, NPR affiliate KNKX announced that it would stop airing Mass’ regular weather segment, saying that the post “draws distorted, offensive parallels between protesters and Nazi Brownshirts,” and that “it does not reflect who we are and what we stand for at KNKX.”

“I’ve talked to people internally at the radio station — they just basically panicked with it,” Mass said. “It was an intense mob on social media that was criticizing them, and they made the decision almost instantly.”

Mass has since removed the references to Kristallnacht, stating that they were acting as a “distraction” from his larger point regarding his stance on protesters shattering the windows of downtown businesses, and in one instance, allegedly assaulting a Queen Anne resident.

Malcolm Gladwell:

I wanted to know where the Derksens found the strength to say those things. A sexual predator had kidnapped and murdered their daughter, and Cliff Derksen could talk about sharing his love with the killer and Wilma could stand up and say, “We have all done something dreadful in our lives, or have felt the urge to.” Where do two people find the power to forgive in a moment like that?

That seemed like a relevant question to ask in a book called David and Goliath. The moral of the biblical account of the duel between David and Goliath, after all, is that our preconceptions about where power and strength reside are false.

Goliath seemed formidable. But there are all kinds of hints in the biblical text that he was, in fact, not everything he seemed. Why did he need to be escorted to the valley floor by an attendant? Why did it take him so long to clue into the fact that David was clearly not intending to fight him with swords? There is even speculation among medical experts that Goliath had been suffering from a condition called acromegaly – a disease that causes abnormal growth but also often has the side effect of restricted sight.

What if Goliath had to be led to the valley floor and took so long to respond to David because he could only see a few feet in-front of him? What if the very thing that made him appear so large and formidable, in other words, was also the cause of his greatest vulnerability?

For the first year of my research, I collected examples of these kinds of paradoxes – where our intuitions about what an advantage or a disadvantage are turn out to be upside down. Why are so many successful entrepreneurs dyslexic? Why did so many American presidents and British prime ministers lose a parent in childhood? Is it possible that some of the things we hold dear in education – like small classes and prestigious schools wh0 can do as much harm as good? I read studies and talked to social scientists and buried myself in the library and thought I knew the kind of book I wanted to write. Then I met Wilma Derksen.

Weapons of the Spirit

Breaking the Code:

I just finished reading Anthony Pedriana’s Leaving Johnny Behind, an enormously important and under-appreciated book that I discovered by chance, thanks to a post on Facebook. (Social media certainly does serve a purpose other than being a black hole of procrastination from time to time!) The author is a retired teacher and principal who, quite by chance, found himself at the center of the reading wars: in an attempt to boost the reading performance of a class that was falling behind, Pedriana went against everything he had been taught and permitted one of the teachers in his school to implement a scripted reading program for a single short lesson each day. Stunned by its success, he began to reconsider his prejudices and attempted to introduce it into other classrooms, only to face a level of rebellion that seemed entirely disproportionate to his request. 

The book that Pedriana produced in response to that experience traces the history of the reading wars, beginning with the education reformer Horace Mann’s fateful trip to Germany in the 1840s—a time when “teachers brandished their instructional authority with the subtlety of a meat cleaver by literally brow-beating number facts and alphabetic knowledge into their quavering charges.”

A Pedriana recounts:  

While Mann was on a trip to Europe, the director of Leipzig’s schools, Dr. Charles Vogel, took him on a classroom tour. What struck Mann most was the dichotomous (compared to U.S. practice) manner in which children were taught to read: 

Not only did he…notice the exceptional quality of the teachers, but he paid great attention to the specific methods they employed. Instead of the children being expected to learn individual letters by rote memory, then syllables, and finally words, they were given books with pictures of common objects. Underneath each picture was its simple name. 

Mann found such tactics tailor-made to his progressive agenda that sought to foster literacy through kindness, respect, and various other expressions of what came to be known as a child-centered curriculum. 

I was familiar with the basics of the story beforehand, but when I encountered it in Pedriana’s book, something made me stop and really think about Mann’s observations and assumptions. 

The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that Mann had fundamentally misread (pun intended!) the situation, mistaking correlation for causation and setting off a slow-motion disaster whose consequences continue to reverberate to this day. 

Let me explain: 

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

5elements:

What if this school year could support your child and family’s well-being? What if, in the midst of this pandemic as the veils of normalcy wear thin, we could create a new way to learn and be together?

5Elements is offering in-person programs that intentionally bolster and create resilience by supporting social development for our community of children, ages 5-17. We will do this by establishing relationships and nurturing their sense of wonder and possibility. We will focus on social & emotional development using outdoor learning, wellness, nature, and creative expression. Think of all that could go right!

Adrianne Jeffries:

As Google faces at least four major antitrust investigations on two continents, internal documents obtained by The Markup show its parent company, Alphabet, has been preparing for this moment for years, telling employees across the massive enterprise that certain language is off limits in all written communications, no matter how casual.

The taboo words include “market,” “barriers to entry,” and “network effects,” which is when products such as social networks become more valuable as more people use them.

“Words matter. Especially in antitrust law,” reads one document titled “Five Rules of Thumb for Written Communications.”

“Alphabet gets sued a lot, and we have our fair share of regulatory investigations,” reads another. “Assume every document will become public.”

The internal documents appear to be part of a self-guided training session for a wide range of the company’s more than 100,000 employees, from engineers to salespeople. One document, titled “Global Competition Policy,” says it applies not only to interns and employees but also to temps, vendors, and contractors.

The documents explain the basics of antitrust law and caution against loose talk that could have implications for government regulators or private lawsuits.



Shashana Wodinsky:

To spare you the misery of sitting through a parade of tech companies failing to be held to account, I decided to pull Zuck’s and Pichai’s three biggest waffles, wavers, and half-truths they told Congress about our privacy. If you want to follow along at home, here’s the Reuters video I’m referencing, and I’ll timestamp each of these quotes.

“We’ve long been working to comply with GDPR, and we’re in full compliance.” — Sundar Pichai, Google [2:53:32]

For some reason, Congressman Kelly Armstrong (D-ND) mentions that Google had, supposedly, “restricted advertising analytics” and cut down on the “portability of data” to comply with GDPR—the prevailing privacy law in the EU—despite the fact that we actually have our own data privacy statutes here in the States, under the CCPA which went into effect earlier this month. He then goes on to ask how Google’s working to comply with those laws in the EU, and Pichai responds that his company’s “long been working to comply with GDPR, we’re in full compliance, to the extent of my knowledge.”

 Many taxpayer supported K-12 school districts use Google services, including Madison.

Vinton Cerf:

Confidential Computing is a transformational technology that should be part of every enterprise cloud deployment. It’s time to start unlocking the possibilities together.

When the Internet was first built, engineers were focused on getting it up and running, and functionality took precedence over protection. But when nefarious actors started to emerge, many pioneers across the industry came together to add more layers of defense. Encryption was used more widely, and the Internet became more secure. 

We’ve come a long way since those early days of the Internet when email showed up as an ARPANET project. It opened up new possibilities; mailing lists such as Sci-Fi Lovers and Yum Yum for restaurant reviews were created. Spam followed not very long after when someone from Digital Equipment Corporation sent out a job posting. Email is now ubiquitous, and organizations are now embracing technologies such as the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence. Cloud computing has entered the mainstream as organizations modernize their technology infrastructure, using the cloud to make fast changes, optimize costs, and get ready for the future. However, as cloud usage explodes, security can’t be an afterthought. Security must be woven into the cloud computing fabric.

Ed Cara:

A bizarre saga of events played out on social media over the weekend, embroiling much of the close-knit world of scientists, academics, and researchers on Twitter. It started with accusations that Arizona State University’s actions had exposed one of their faculty members, an Indigenous woman and anthropologist, to an ultimately fatal case of covid-19. But it ended with allegations that the death was a hoax, carried out by someone who also faked the supposed professor’s entire existence.

Senator Rand Paul:

Yesterday, U.S. Senator and Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee member Rand Paul (R-KY) introduced S. 4432, the Support Children Having Open Opportunities for Learning (SCHOOL) Act to provide parents and students with much-needed flexibility and options regarding K-12 education.

 “As the impact of the ongoing pandemic and the government response efforts continue to place parents in situations requiring greater flexibility in balancing working and providing for their families’ critical needs, especially when educating their children at home, my SCHOOL Act grants them that flexibility by empowering them to use their own tax dollars to find the option that best fits their family’s needs and allowing them to reclaim a bit of stability in uncertain times,” said Dr. Paul. 

 While federal education dollars are currently sent to states and then distributed amongst public school districts, Dr. Paul’s legislation would allow federal funds for K-12 education to follow the eligible child, learning in person or remotely, to the school of their choice. 

 Whether in public school, private school, or homeschool, the funds can be used for a wide range of educational needs, including tuition, curriculum materials, technology, support for special education, or classes outside the home.

 As families face the reality of hybrid learning or a completely virtual school year, students, especially those with disabilities, need a choice in education and the tools to succeed no matter where they are learning. 

Brad Polumbo:

Under the status quo, taxpayer dollars fund government schools, not education.

Americans are taxed to provide federal education funding, ostensibly for the education of their children and others, but the money goes to finance public schools regardless of whether those students end up attending them. If families choose to homeschool or send their children to private schools, the taxpayer money marked for their child’s education still goes to the public school, and the family is left to cover the actual cost of their kids’ schooling on their own. This means that in many cases, low-income families have no choice but to send their children to public schools, even if those very schools are failing their students.

The broken system for the allocation of federal education funds was already a problem before the COVID-19 pandemic. However, due to that crisis and sweeping government restrictions, many public schools will remain closed for in-person learning this fall. Some families who have been forced to rely on these schools simply cannot work and pay their bills without the crucial childcare services that go along with educational programs, and their personal circumstances may be such that draconian COVID-19 avoidance efforts are not necessary nor warranted.

Nellie Bowles:

Faizel Khan was being told by the news media and his own mayor that the protests in his hometown were peaceful, with “a block party atmosphere.”

But that was not what he saw through the windows of his Seattle coffee shop. He saw encampments overtaking the sidewalks. He saw roving bands of masked protesters smashing windows and looting.

Young white men wielding guns would harangue customers as well as Mr. Khan, a gay man of Middle Eastern descent who moved here from Texas so he could more comfortably be out. To get into his coffee shop, he sometimes had to seek the permission of self-appointed armed guards to cross a border they had erected.

“They barricaded us all in here,” Mr. Khan said. “And they were sitting in lawn chairs with guns.”

For 23 days in June, about six blocks in the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood were claimed by left-wing demonstrators and declared police-free. Protesters hailed it as liberation — from police oppression, from white supremacy — and a catalyst for a national movement.

Zach Goldberg:

Karen Ann Cullotta:

When Mairin Gradek’s local schools superintendent posted a cheerful YouTube video in early July describing tentative plans to welcome students back into the classroom, the Arlington Heights mother of three was excited that more remote learning was merely an option for parents, not the whole plan.

Gradek’s optimism that her neighborhood schools would reopen this fall was also buoyed by the results of a recent School District 25 survey, which found that around 75% of parents supported either an in-person or hybrid plan, with remote learning trailing as the least popular option in third place.

But in recent days, District 25 joined a rapidly growing list of suburban school systems that have abandoned hopes of bringing kids back into the classroom at the start of the new school year.

Officials in District 25, Barrington District 220, Wheeling-based District 21, Plainfield District 202 and Stevenson and Evanston Township high schools, among others, have all reverted from in-person or hybrid plans to an all-remote start to the new year, deciding the risks of bringing students and teachers together are too high with COVID-19 still far from contained.

Craig Chamberlain:

Their “elite/legacy” cluster was the largest, including about 30% of the journalists covered in the study, with The Washington Post, NBC News, NPR and The New York Times among the major newsrooms represented.

A congressional journalism cluster included another 20%. The other clusters centered around CNN, television producers, local political news, regulatory journalists, foreign affairs, long-form/enterprise reporting and social issues.

In leading the study, Usher said she wanted to “describe the contours of what political journalism in Washington looks like and of the process of making news unfold.” Another goal was to better understand how journalists connect to and learn from each other and establish conventional knowledge.

Twitter seemed an ideal way to do that, given its unique role among journalists as a virtual water cooler, Usher said. “Most of the time, what happens on Twitter does not reflect the real world. But in the case of political journalism and political elites, generally speaking, what happens on Twitter is reality.” It’s an online reflection of their offline lives and work, she said, and plays a significant role in agenda-setting.

“So this was a particularly potent way of looking, at scale, at how ideas are exchanged, how people are making sense of things,” Usher said.

The “at scale” part is where Ng comes in. Usher’s research has focused more on qualitative research, primarily about elite U.S. newsrooms and how new technology impacts how journalists work. Ng, however, specializes in big data and computational social science. She saw particular power in applying those tools to journalists’ interactions on Twitter.

“With more than 2,000 journalists in this study, we could not observe each of them individually in real life. So we used their digital life as a way to understand how they interact with their peers,” Ng said.

Yvonne Kim:

The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents unanimously approved emergency rules Wednesday to comply with new federal regulations on sexual assault and harassment, which will be effective Aug. 14 pending the governor’s approval.

Though some regents expressed concern that the process was moving too quickly, the Board moved forward in the rulemaking process on July 20 to meet new guidelines in Title IX, a federal law that bans discrimination on the basis of sex at any institution receiving financial assistance. The emergency rules will expire between January and May of 2021, but the System will continue drafting language this fall to implement permanent changes.

Dawn Gilbertson:

Wondering how states and cities enforce traveler quarantines to help stop the spread of COVID-19?

Chicago health officials turn to social media for help.

The city issued an emergency travel order July 2 requiring visitors and residents who have traveled to destinations with problematic COVID-19 trends to quarantine for 14 days on arrival. Authorities check the online posts of suspected violators.

If someone is on officials’ radar through contact tracing or other measures, that person’s social media accounts are checked to gather evidence for a possible citation, Chicago Department of Public Health Commissioner Allison Arwady said at a news conference Tuesday.

Annysa Johnson:

A prominent Lutheran minister well known for her work at the nexus of faith and racial justice is calling on Black families to pull their children from Milwaukee Lutheran High School over its position on the Black Lives Matter movement.

Milwaukee Lutheran posted a statement online late Tuesday saying it has long supported “Black Lives and Black Families” but that the founding principles and beliefs of the Black Lives Matter organization “do not align with biblical views,” citing specifically its position supporting LGBTQ rights.

The post ignited a firestorm on social media, with many — including students, parents and alumni — calling it un-Christlike and insulting to the Black students and families that make up the majority of the school’s enrollment. Several said they experienced racism at the school.

On Wednesday, Venice Williams, who is internationally known for her work at Milwaukee’s Alice’s Garden — and whose youngest son just graduated from Milwaukee Lutheran — took to Facebook to call on Black families to boycott the school.

“Shame on You, Milwaukee Lutheran High School,” Williams said in her post.

Oregon State University:

A new study from Oregon State University found that 77% of low- to moderate-income American households fall below the asset poverty threshold, meaning that if their income were cut off they would not have the financial assets to maintain at least poverty-level status for three months.

The study compared asset poverty rates in the U.S. and Canada. Canada’s asset poverty rate has improved over the past 20 years while the U.S. rate has worsened, but still, 62% of low- to moderate-income Canadians also fall below the asset poverty threshold.

The implications of these findings have become starkly apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic, said David Rothwell, lead author on the study and an associate professor in OSU’s College of Public Health and Human Sciences.

“The fact that the U.S. safety net is so connected to work, and then you have this huge shock to employment, you have a system that’s not prepared to handle such a big change to the employment system … It results concretely in family stress and strain, and then that strain and stress relates to negative outcomes for children and families,” Rothwell said.

Costs continue to grow for local, state and federal taxpayers in the K-12 space, as well:

Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:

Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.

Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.

(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.

– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

The Economist:

IN THE NORMAL run of things, late summer sees airports in the emerging world fill with nervous 18-year-olds, jetting off to begin a new life in the rich world’s universities. The annual trek of more than 5m students is a triumph of globalisation. Students see the world; universities get a fresh batch of high-paying customers. Yet with flights grounded and borders closed, this migration is about to become the pandemic’s latest victim.

For students, covid-19 is making life difficult. Many must choose between inconveniently timed seminars streamed into their parents’ living rooms and inconveniently deferring their studies until life is more normal. For universities, it is disastrous. They will not only lose huge chunks of revenue from foreign students but, because campus life spreads infection, they will have to transform the way they operate (see Briefing).

Yet the disaster may have an upside. For many years government subsidies and booming demand have allowed universities to resist changes that could benefit both students and society. They may not be able to do so for much longer.

Higher education has been thriving. Since 1995, as the notion spread from the rich world to the emerging one that a degree from a good institution was essential, the number of young people enrolling in higher education rose from 16% of the relevant age group to 38%. The results have been visible on swanky campuses throughout the Anglosphere, whose better universities have been the principal beneficiaries of the emerging world’s aspirations.

Yet troubles are piling up. China has been a source of high-paying foreign students for Western universities, but relations between the West and China are souring. Students with ties to the army are to be banned from America.

Knight Foundation:

A new report from Gallup and Knight Foundation finds a widening gap between what Americans expect from the news media and what they think they are getting. While Americans increasingly value the media’s role in our democracy, they are losing confidence in the idea of an objective media as perceptions of bias grow. 

The findings were released today in “American Views 2020: Trust, Media and Democracy,” a landmark survey of 20,000 Americans that is part of the Gallup/Knight series on the evolution of Americans’ relationship with the news. The report is available at kf.org/usviews20.

The report’s major findings include the following:

Daniel Greenfield:

The police aren’t policing and the teachers aren’t teaching. While many vital services aren’t functioning, the useless machinery of the bureaucracy grinds on with no one to pay for it. Locked down businesses don’t generate revenues and the unemployed aren’t a tax base.

Tax revenues in New York City fell 46% in June. A third of small businesses in the city are likely to shut down for good and sales tax collections are down by a quarter amounting to $1.2 billion.

Statewide, there’s a 37% drop, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other lefties are calling for higher taxes on the rich, staging protests outside the homes of billionaires. But the wealthy have the resources to pick up and leave while leaving failing states like New York with nothing.

Nothing except a $14 billion deficit and an 8.2% GDP drop.

“You have 100 billionaires. You will have to tax every billionaire half a billion dollars to make it up. You know what that means? That means you have no billionaires,” Governor Cuomo noted.

But the news is bad everywhere.

State revenue shortfalls are heading toward $200 billion and over $500 billion by 2022 as the wealthy flee urban areas, tourists are banned from even thinking about visiting, and businesses keep going out of business.

Andrew Cuomo:

“If I stay there, I pay a lower income tax, because they don’t pay the New York City surcharge.”

Costs continue to grow for local, state and federal taxpayers in the K-12 space, as well:

Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:

Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.

Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.

(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.

– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Chrissy Clark:

Activists plan to sue the mayor of Washington, D.C., after police arrested two students for chalking a pro-life message outside of a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic.

Students for Life will file a lawsuit against D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser (D.) following the arrest of a student activist and staffer for writing “Black Preborn Lives Matter” with sidewalk chalk outside of the clinic. In a letter from Students for Life president Kristan Hawkins the group outlined its upcoming lawsuit, which alleges Bowser violated the group’s First Amendment rights.

“The next place Mayor Bowser will see us will be in the courtroom,” the letter reads. “Because Students for Life will sue the city of Washington, D.C., for violating our First Amendment rights to free speech and expression.”

The activist group was met with six police cars and members were threatened with arrest before writing the message. Video footage shows police officers handcuffing 29-year-old staffer Warner DePriest and Towson University student Erica Caporaletti.

Jocelyn Grzeszcak:

Tenured faculty members at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) told undergraduate students in an open letter not to return to campus this fall because of coronavirus concerns, the latest move in the debate over reopening schools.

“We need to stay safe from Covid-19 by staying at home – and we need you to stay home in order to protect yourselves and your fellow students, your teachers, the many workers who serve you on campus, the residents of Chapel Hill and Carrboro, and your own family members and loved ones,” 30 tenured faculty members wrote in a letter published Thursday by The Charlotte Observer.

UNC-CH announced in May that it would begin classes on August 10, with the university offering multiple instruction models for students depending on class size and student preference. Classes may be offered face-to-face, entirely remote or a hybrid model of the two, according to the school’s website.

But administrators made these plans for reopening on the assumption that the first wave of coronavirus infections seen in the spring would be over by the time school began, the faculty members wrote in their letter.

Kirsten Grind:

In the olden days, one-room schoolhouses were common across the country, many of them simple wood-frame buildings painted white.

Katy Young’s one-room school is going be a dome.

Ms. Young, who lives in the suburbs outside Berkeley, Calif., recently set up a 24-foot-round geodesic polyhedron in her backyard to host a small group of kindergarteners. An Airstream trailer parked nearby will serve as an administrative office.

The dome was built by Ms. Young’s husband, Randy, for use at Burning Man, the annual outdoor art festival in the Nevada desert. But with Burning Man canceled this summer, the structure is being repurposed for her kindergarten son and five classmates, whose private Mandarin-language school has switched to distance learning in the fall.

“We’re calling it ‘dome school,’ ” said Ms. Young, a lawyer.

With thousands of schools across the country moving to partial or full remote learning in the fall, parents are racing to form small at-home schooling groups or “pandemic pods,” groups of children who will be taught together. Some parents are hiring teachers to help guide the students through remote learning, while others plan to devise lesson plans on their own.

But finding a place to host the mini schools is proving to be a challenge. Even for parents that have the space, hosting students inside seems iffy because of social-distancing guidelines. Plus, many parents are working from home and don’t want the distraction.

Joshua T. Katz:

Now is the time to debate with renewed vigor existential questions of what counts as justice and how to fashion an equitable society. But the stifling of dissent is impeding the search for answers and driving people who disagree still further apart. Because students like to push boundaries and professors like to argue, colleges and universities are a crucible.

Take the university where I teach, Princeton. The campus—or at least the online campus, in the age of the coronavirus—has been in uproar since early July over a letter of demands to the administration signed by hundreds of my faculty colleagues, and especially over my response to that letter. I was immediately denounced on social media and condemned publicly by my department and the university president. At the same time, the university spokesman announced ominously that the administration would be “looking into the matter further.” On July 14, the Journal’s editorial board commented: “Princeton is demonstrating how a lack of leadership enables the cancel culture.”

Joyu Wang and Lucy Craymer:

Teachers who backed antigovernment protests in the city—by taking to the streets or supporting the demonstrators on social media—are being reprimanded and, in some cases, fired as China’s Communist Party increasingly moves to stamp out dissent.

Many observers say they fear the tradition of liberal education and critical thinking in what has been a major world financial center will be supplanted by Chinese-style pro-government lessons and suppression of political discourse. Pressure has mounted since Beijing imposed a sweeping new national-security law here at the end of June following a year of protests.

The law gives China’s government much greater powers to police the city and punish those accused of subversion and supporting separatism. Police officers have moved swiftly to quash dissent and implement the law.

A powerful new security agency for the city rapidly set up a headquarters, and Beijing installed an official with experience battling protests and media as the law’s chief enforcer. Public libraries have removed books by pro-democracy figures.

The law calls for heightened supervision and regulation of schools—measures that follow months of warnings to teachers that they not discuss their political views with students or participate in protest activities.

Mike Antonucci:

Students of civics might think the California state budget is crafted by the elected representatives of the citizenry, who debate and amend proposals working their way through various committees, ultimately leading to a spending plan with majority support and the signature of the governor.

All that happens, of course, but no budget makes it to the governor’s desk without at least the tacit approval of the state’s public employee unions. Since public education alone makes up a minimum of 40 percent of the state budget, the California Teachers Association has an outsize influence over the construction of that budget.

This has been true for at least the 27 years I have covered the union’s operations. In 2000, for example, then-President Wayne Johnson boasted to his members about how he had the governor and state legislative leaders on the phone with him, falling over themselves to place more money in the education budget, until Johnson finally relented at an additional $1.84 billion.

This year’s budget, however, rivals any previous examples of teachers union benefits sewn into state law.

Imaginary money. The budget relies on two sources of funding that do not exist, and may never exist. First, it hopes that the U.S. Senate will approve, and President Donald Trump will sign, the HEROES Act, which contains $1 trillion in aid to state and local governments. Should that fail to happen, California will issue $12 billion in deferrals to school districts. Deferrals are essentially IOUs to be paid in the next fiscal year. This is also money that doesn’t yet exist.

Should deferrals become necessary, the state also authorizes school districts to transfer money from any account they hold to any other account in order to pay their bills. Money targeted for a specific purpose or program can be used for any purpose or program. Districts can also use the proceeds from the sale or lease of property for any general fund purpose.

Costs continue to grow for local, state and federal taxpayers in the K-12 space, as well:

Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:

Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.

Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.

(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.

– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Scott Girard:

Logan Wroge:

Costs continue to grow for local, state and federal taxpayers in the K-12 space, as well:

Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:

Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.

Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.

(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.

– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Robert Shrimsley:

An old friend has a theory. The way we look at other people’s responses to the Covid regulations reminds her of the early weeks of parenthood. Just as new parents respond viscerally to others behaving differently, so we are equally agitated by those taking a different approach to the virus.

One of the reasons we react so strongly to those following a different path is that to the judgmental — and if there is one thing this virus has made all of us it is more judgmental — the actions of others stand as a rebuke to our own choices.

Of course there is far more to it. The primary responses right now are driven by fear, anger and notions of fairness. The most frightened resent the less cautious; those more concerned with the social cost resent the fearful. Those struggling to cope resent the well-heeled demanding restrictions whose impact they cannot comprehend.

But there is definitely something to my friend’s theory. Her argument runs that in the first weeks of parenthood you feel you are being constantly judged by others, often people you do not know. Strangers feel entitled to advise you where you are going wrong and you sense disapproval everywhere.

As a new parent you are hurled into a world for which you are little prepared and your child-rearing choices feel like a statement of who you are. From the debates over epidurals to the arguments over breast milk and sleep training, every decision is a cause of angst.

Difficult.

Matthew 7:

1“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. 2For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

3“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? 4How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? 5You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.

Arizona free enterprise club:

The would-be school year is fast approaching and thousands of parents across Arizona are panicking. 

How will their children learn this year?  When will they have a physical place to go?  Will parents be able to return to work?  Will they have to pay for tutors out of pocket? 

With most of the critical reopening decisions now in the hands of Superintendent Kathy Hoffman, school districts and ultimately the teachers’ union, it’s obvious now that crafting a system that works for parents and kids won’t be the top priority for the educational establishment.  Every decision from here on out will be to cater to the desires of administrators and teachers. Period.

Come August 17th, district school families will be forced to accept whatever dysfunctional Covid-schooling platform that is thrusted into their laps.  Parents of low-income families will be hit the hardest, especially those who can’t work from home. Special needs children will be hung out to dry. Kids in abusive households will continue to have no escape from a hostile environment.

And if any parent or taxpayer questions why their needs appear to be secondary to those of the educational establishment, they are immediately shouted down and told that they just want people to die.  So what if your child needs in person learning—you should just accept paying unlimited amounts in taxes to feed a substandard educational system that only adds to the chaos in your life.

Elle Reynolds:

As the White House and House and Senate leaders continue trying to decide how to distribute more deficit spending on items tagged “coronavirus,” Democrats have come under fire for pushing a $137 billion tax break for the wealthy. The proposal, which was also part of a 1,800-page bill the Democrat-led House passed in May, would remove the current $10,000 limit on state and local tax deductions from federal taxes through 2021.

The richest Americans use this tax break, which effectively subsidizes high-tax states by lowering their fiscal burdens to high-income taxpayers. The Tax Policy Center, an affiliate of the Brookings Institution, estimated the proposal would give an average tax cut of $33,000 to the top 1 percent of income earners. Over half of the benefits of the proposal would go to that top 1 percent.

Costs continue to grow for local, state and federal taxpayers in the K-12 space, as well:

Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:

Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.

Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.

(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.

– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration